


It Hits.....

by TheUntitledWritingProject



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: M/M, Non-Canonical Character Death, Non-Graphic Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-28
Updated: 2020-08-28
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:22:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26149396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheUntitledWritingProject/pseuds/TheUntitledWritingProject
Summary: It hits hard...
Relationships: Male Courier/Arcade Gannon
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	It Hits.....

It hits him young. Arcade was five when they brought the armor home, scarred and hollow, the hole in its plating mimicking the one in the family photos where his mother tried for a fresh start and nobody else bothered. The stories were too mixed for a child to make sense of and he swore he aged ten years that day. He always felt too old for his bones, though his feet remained to small for the shoes they were expected to fill. What hits him then is sharp, sheering through him like nails on a chalkboard and his soul screams but his mouth doesn’t because what man of the house shows such weakness? He was his father’s son after all. He was in charge now. If you can consider a two people and the elephant in the room family anymore. He reads to get away from the mess of emotions and fears around him and lies to everyone when he says its for education. He lies to himself to. He can handle their expectations and the burden of a legacy he doesn’t quite understand because if they knew, oh if they knew why he knew so much they’d never let him open another book. He lies to himself, telling himself its to become a better soldier, like his father. To become a better man. Escape was never an option. It hits him then, the walls closing in as the box he put himself in became smaller and smaller until he realized it’s a cage. He doesn’t realize till the door is shut.  
  
It hit again at sixteen. When the storm was coming at them with fire and hatred. He knew the man his father was, despite the man he wished he could be and if there was a difference between the steel surrounding his friends and the steel surrounding his enemies he had never learned it. Metal clashed against metal and their home among the waves crashed with casualties on all sides, involuntary sacrifices made and paid by those too lowly to sit back and watch it happen. He’d put it on then, siding into the armor still stained on the inside and swearing as his feet shifted in plated boots each time he took a step. Far too big. He fires at people he may or may not know and prays he doesn’t hit someone he’d regret. The list wasn’t long, but it was still there. It hits like the waves against the steel beams and charges he didn’t see blew them to pieces. He’s forced into a boat that can barely hold both of them and if he cries there is too much glass in front of his face for anyone to see. His soul screams. His mouth does too. His com is off.  
  
It hit him again. At twenty-three, staring down at the hollow shell of what could have been armor for all he knew of what was underneath. Her hands were still soft but her eyes were cold and her chest stayed still after days of shaking violent, the cough breaking what few brittle ribs the dogs of war had left her with. He stares down, wishing he had her once bright eyes and his father’s dark hair rather than the other way around. He wished his laughed the way hers always would but the steel bars of his cage kept them cold and grey. People always told him they looked intelligent but he only saw them as sharp and oh how he wished to see her deep brown shining back at him in the mirror. But no. He got the hair she’d always kept in a bun and the eyes he would never remember if people didn’t remind him of them every time they saw him. It hit him then. Softly and quietly, her spirit lingering where her life could not and oh how the air seemed to dance in relief. The pain that had radiated out of the room for weeks on end was finally, finally free. She was gone but not forgotten and the sounds of suffering would fade from this room in time. He didn’t know if he would ever stop hearing them. Nothing screams. It just breaths its first unlabored breath since she first collapsed and it feels like hell and healing all at once. Maybe someday he could remember her smile without his own chest ripping in to. He wondered if he got that instead of her eyes.  
  
It returned for him at twenty-nine. A woman he’d just met offering him a job he couldn’t refuse with a trek he would hate to make but longed to complete like his soul demanded it. He’d heard of the others that headed for the city of sin, trying to stay ahead of a bear that just seemed determined to hunt for sport. What should have stood for lust and luck now held the promise of his own life direction and white replaced iron with a red cross where his father’s crest once stood. He looked himself over and over again in the mirror and feared the intelligence in his eyes looked as fake as it usually felt. Steel still reflected across a legacy he could now run from and the door was open but the cage moved with him. He ran for the exit. It always stayed one step ahead. It was cold then, freezing down his spine and wrapping around his throat in a grip far too icy to match the heat of the desert as two armies marched and good people got caught in the middle. Some stared at him too long, looking him in the eyes like they held his full life story and he knew, he knew one day someone would figure out he survived what he shouldn’t have. The glasses are thick and the corners of his vision pull slightly but oh how its worth it to see the grey distorted in the mirror. He never takes them off again.  
  
It hits you differently at thirty-two. When the light is fading and the walls are too thin. When the blood streaming down his arms comes from a man he didn’t know twenty minutes ago. When the pulse he is clinging too starts counting down to the end of a story he will never be able to hear. It hits him hard, slamming him straight into a brick wall as he’s fighting for a life he didn’t know he would have to save. The shredded skin and mass of limbs on the cot in front of him can’t breath for itself anymore and the gurgled cough it gives as its heart falls silent is worse than any scream he has ever heard in his life. It hits him then. Time doesn’t stand still. It moves and it flows and he fight back the bitter self-hatred as he walks out of the room with the signs of war all over the faded white of his coat to tell someone whose name he was never given that their hope wasn’t enough. It doesn’t knock the wind out of him. It gives form to words that he know sound hollow and the sheer pain in his eyes that he know they can’t see. It hits him differently, but it still hits him.  
  
It doesn’t hit at thirty-six. When a whirlwind breaks through the door and steals a woman he knew was far too bored with her post. When deep brown meets distorted steel and he swears, just for a moment, someone looks at him and likes what they see. He expected it to hurt. To shred apart everything he is as he walks out the front door with a man he just met and barely a word to those he’d been working with on his own free will for the first time in his life. But he’s calm and he’s steady and he knows what to look for when it hits his companion instead, barreling into him at full force. He watches the impact and stands back where spaces is needed until his friend collapses in his arms then drags him halfway across the Mojave in search of some cure he’d never known to look for. Its heavy and it hurts because its not his to carry but dear God he would try. He could do this. They could do this. But they need what he left behind and he doesn’t know if he’s prepared to get it. He offers it anyway. 

He fears it now. Knows its coming as they chase down people who probably wished he would have died along with the rest of those they had lost. He watches and frets and asks again and again if he should keep running or just accept it. The answer remains the same. Neither. The hands that he holds now are nowhere near soft but they are more gentle than any he as ever known and they glide across scars he didn’t realize he had because why on earth would he bother to look? They soothe and they comfort, and he’s drawn into a world he didn’t know he could exist in. Others join, though they keep their distance, never sliding against his skin but pulling him up all the same and perhaps the cage had stopped moving after all. The door is open. With figures on the other side. And he runs through. Confusion knits across the brow he had kissed over and over again as he hurries away, running back to the last place he’d left the legacy he’d been born into. The armor is as heavy as he remembers and it’s a struggle to keep it in his arms. A boot falls. It looks the right size now. He holds his breath as he slips it on his foot and is surprised by the pain that shoots up his leg at the first tentative step. For all he had known he would need to fill the shoe eventually he never believed he would outgrow it. But his toes curl like they did the night before for an entirely different reason and all he had feared evaporated as the metal rubs his heels raw. They weren’t his to wear. The thought gives him comfort. He hands them over.  
  
It leaves him now, pushed away by sure fingers that draw circles across his back in a room they now own together. The light outside hasn’t made it to their window and if they both have things to do they refuse to acknowledge them until it does. Soft dark hair splays across his shoulder and his eyes are still steel but oh for the brown ones always looking back at him in the mirror, their owner smiling at their reflections as he’s pulled into an embrace from behind. Soft lips map kisses just beneath his blond locks and when he returns the smile he sees it. Its small and its tired but it pulls up father in one corner in than the other, a dimple forming in his left cheek and he knows, he knows, it was hers.


End file.
